by Alex Gilly
“How was your day?” he said.
“It’s good to be home.”
She leaned down and kissed him, still smiling. He was wide awake now. He wrapped his arms around her and flipped her onto her back.
“I read the article in the Times,” she said.
The smile fell off his face.
She stroked his cheek. “You okay?” she said.
“I was worried you might write a letter or something.”
“Oh, I did. I wrote to the editor saying I was going to sue them for publishing insinuations and fabrications and for showing you in a false light. I said the suit was frivolous, opportunistic, and totally inappropriate. I said the man in the article is not the man I married. I know who you are.”
Finn saw the laughter in her eyes. “You didn’t send it, did you?”
She laughed. “No. But I wanted to. I was so mad.”
The muscle at the base of Finn’s neck twitched and unraveled.
“You know who I am, huh?” he said.
“Every inch of you. What about you? You know who I am?”
He kissed her neck, her cheek. “Sure,” he said.
“Oh yeah? You sure? Tell me who I am.”
He stroked his chin, made a show of collecting his thoughts.
“You were raised in Lincoln Heights. Your dad worked construction. Retired, moved out to Glendale, but can’t stop working, so he’s set himself up as a part-time carpenter out there. Your mom’s a mom. You have one brother who got shortchanged, since you got the looks and the brains. You graduated from Lincoln High and were the first person in your family to go to college. You went to USC on a full scholarship and majored in politics with minors in French and Spanish. Then you went to Gould School of Law—”
“You sound like you’re reading my CV.”
“You’re a woman who helps people who need help.”
She rolled her eyes. “Could you make me any more boring,” she said.
“Like everyone in your family, you like dogs.”
She feigned a yawn. “Tell me something no one else knows.”
“Okay. You’re the finest piece of ass on the West Coast.”
She opened her eyes wide in mock umbrage. “Let go of my hand so I can slap you. What about the East Coast?”
“You’re the world’s slowest cyclist.”
“What’s the rush?”
“You curl your toes when you come.”
She giggled. “Better,” she said.
She pushed him onto his back and straddled him.
“You just earned yourself a cinq à sept, monsieur.”
“What’s that?”
She started to unbutton her blouse. “It means you’re busy for the rest of the afternoon, baby.”
* * *
Later, Finn cooked rice and marinated two tuna steaks in soy while he fixed a salad and waited for the griddle to heat. Mona was in the shower. When he heard the water turn off, he put the steaks on, the soy spitting off the griddle. Finn wore sweatpants and a fresh T-shirt and was barefoot. He was drinking a club soda from the bottle. He fetched Mona’s half-full bottle of white wine from the fridge door, then dimmed the lights in the eating area. He piled rice on two plates, put the tuna steaks on top of that, and carried them to the table.
Mona walked in, also barefoot, drying her hair and wearing her favorite jeans and blouse, the one with a flower print. When he poured her a glass of wine, the smell of the alcohol triggered a feeling he hadn’t felt for a year and half. He quickly got himself another club soda.
They sat facing each other, grinning like teenagers.
“You’ve forgotten something,” she said. She went to the sideboard and came back with a couple of candlesticks and a box of matches.
“We got it the other way around,” said Finn, across the flickering candlelight.
“What do you mean?”
“Usually it’s dinner first, then sex.”
She smiled. “You’re talking about dating rules, baby. The rules change when you get married.”
“Different game, huh?”
“No. It’s the same game, just for higher stakes. This is good,” she said, forking the tuna into her mouth. “Tell me about your day.”
“It ended well,” he said with a wry grin. Then he told her the rest of it—about the phantom’s reappearance and disappearance, about the floater, about his meeting with Glenn, about his being seconded to cargo inspection, and about the IA investigators.
“You’ve got that Zorro look on your face,” he said, “the one you have when you’re getting ready to fight injustice.”
“It is injustice. I’m gonna sue them!”
“Who?”
“All of them! Glenn, the CBP, Homeland Security…”
“Homeland Security?” He laughed.
Mona couldn’t walk by an injustice and not try to right it. It was her natural tendency, one of the things Finn loved about her. Back when they’d first become patrol partners, Diego had bantered to Finn about his “liberal lawyer” sister, making it clear that he was using the terms liberal and lawyer pejoratively. Diego didn’t approve of his sister’s vocation.
Finn, however, did. When Diego did finally introduce him to Mona, Finn had liked pretty much everything he saw. But Mona had taken one look at his CBP uniform and said, “I don’t date my brother’s friends.”
If she’d meant to discourage him, it hadn’t worked. Finn had found out that she was speaking at a forum called “No More Deaths: Toward a Safer Border” at the Self-help Graphics and Art Center, a hub of Latino activism. When she spotted him in the audience wearing civilian clothes and holding flowers, she smiled.
They were married six months later.
“I don’t trust Glenn one bit,” she said.
“I’m with you there.”
“Someone must’ve leaked the story.”
“Why would Glenn leak a story that makes the CBP look bad?”
“Because he knew the story was coming out anyway and he needed a fall guy. A rotten apple to throw away, make it look like it’s just you instead of the whole system. I keep telling you, honey: it’s not the apple that’s rotten, it’s the barrel.”
“He opened fire. I don’t think I did anything wrong.”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second—long enough for Finn to notice.
He let it slide.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re going to try hard to make it look like you did. That way it’s on you, and they stay on their promotion tracks. That’s how rank works.”
She sipped from her wineglass.
“We need a strategy in case they go after you. We can’t focus on the fact that you fired in self-defense—even though you did—because there’s no evidence that Perez was even armed, let alone that he opened fire—”
“But if both Diego and I say he did…”
“It might not be enough. Why risk it? No, we need to show that Perez was the type of person who would fire on U.S. federal agents—that he was a gangster, basically. Of course, what would be best of all is if we could prove that he was engaged in criminal activity at the time of the shooting.”
“He was a hundred miles north of the line without an entry permit.”
Mona frowned. “That’s not good enough, Nick. I mean a real crime.”
He shrugged. “His gun went in the water. It’s two and a half thousand feet deep out there. We’re not getting it back. We’re searching the boat, but so far we’ve found nothing.”
“We need to find out everything we can about him. Find out who he really was and what he was really doing.”
Finn scratched his chin. “I keep coming back to this one thing.”
“What?”
Finn drained his club soda and said, “When we fished the body out this morning, there was a shark hanging around nearby.”
“You think it was the one that took the poor guy’s legs?”
“Probably.”
“Oh my god.�
� Mona put her hand to her mouth. “That’s awful, but you’re right, it’s not relevant,” she said a moment later. “It’s got nothing to do with Perez. We need to find out what Perez was doing, whether he was smuggling narcotics or something else. We already know he was a bad guy, since he shot at you. Now we need the investigators to know that, too.”
Finn didn’t think the shark was irrelevant, but he let it go. “How do we do that?” he said.
“I’ll start by asking my contacts to find out if he was involved with any of the trafficking networks. Meanwhile, you need to contact the Mexicans and find out if he’s on any of their cartel lists.”
Finn nodded, said nothing, scratched his face.
“What?” said Mona.
“I was just thinking, we found the floater off Two Harbors, not far from where we intercepted Perez.”
“A week’s gone by. I can’t see how they’re connected.”
“I don’t know. It just seems like a lot’s happening in what used to be a quiet patch of sea.” He remembered Garcia talking about the shark sightings off Catalina. “A quiet patch of sea,” he murmured again.
Mona reached across the table and put her hand over his. “Honey … did you make the appointment?” she said.
After Finn had killed Perez, Mona had given him the name of a counselor. Mona believed that counseling should be made mandatory for every CBP agent who shot someone, nationwide.
“Not yet,” he said.
“You promised…”
“I know, and I will. I just haven’t had the time.”
Mona nodded slowly. She didn’t look like she was buying his no-time thing, but she didn’t say anything about it. Then she said, “I worry about you, honey. I don’t want this to mess with your mind. It’s the machine that’s broken—not you. I don’t want you to get ground up in the gears.”
Finn gave her a lukewarm smile. He loved his wife, but he couldn’t understand that kind of talk. He’d served eight years in the military. Perez hadn’t been his first firefight. Sure, he hadn’t been sleeping right since he’d shot him; sure, he’d felt like a drink for the first time in months; but he didn’t see how talking to a stranger would help. He hadn’t needed to talk to anyone when his dad died; he’d stopped drinking without having to go to those meetings she was always on him about; he’d been through worse, guarding oil terminals in southern Iraq, without having to blab about it. He couldn’t figure out how everyone talking about themselves all the time helped anything. His view was: just move on; everything passes eventually.
He took the plates into the kitchen. She followed him in, leaned against the counter, and watched him scrub plates at the sink for a while.
Then she said, her voice softer now, “Promise me, Nick.”
He used a dishrag to dry his hands. “I promise,” he said.
She smiled and kissed him. Her lips tasted of wine. He felt the tingle on the tip of his tongue.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “What if you quit?”
“Quit what? My job?”
“Yeah. Quit the CBP entirely.”
“And do what?”
She smiled. “You said to me once, your dream was to have your own commercial fishing boat? We could move to Monterey, you could get your license … get your own boat eventually—”
“How would we live?”
She looked at him in mock surprise. “Mi amor, did you forget I am a lawyer?”
She must’ve seen Finn bristle because she laughed and said, “Look at you, all old-school! Don’t like the idea of a woman keeping you, huh? Don’t worry, honey, you’ll have plenty of time to look after me later, when I’m pregnant. Then you can be my breadwinner. But first”—she put her wineglass down and pressed herself against him—“I need to be pregnant.”
Finn grinned.
This felt better than talking.
CHAPTER FOUR
Finn parked his Tacoma in a bay at the CBP station. Mona pulled up next to him in her RAV4. Finn got out of his truck and into the passenger seat of hers. He was wearing his dress uniform. Mona was wearing her no-nonsense lawyer outfit, a barrette holding her hair back in a ponytail. Today she had taken her “cheap fake” handbag along with her briefcase.
“Remember, these people aren’t your friends,” she said. She had the vanity mirror down and was doing something around her eyes. “They’re going to try their hardest to pull apart your story, so take it slow and think carefully before you say anything. If they ask any leading questions or try any tricks, let me do the talking. Got it?”
“Got it.”
She leaned over for a kiss.
* * *
It was a beautiful fall day, cool and bright. Ruining it was Garrett Smith, loitering on the steps of the station. He thrust a micro-recorder into Finn’s face.
“How do you feel ahead of today’s hearing into the Perez shooting, Agent Finn?”
“What hearing?”
Garrett gave a lopsided smile. “Don’t insult me, Finn. You’re not the only one who can do his job.”
Finn brushed his way past the reporter and entered through the swing doors.
“How did he know?” he said.
“Because this place leaks like a sieve,” said Mona, “The system’s—”
“Broken, I know.”
Diego was waiting for them in the lobby.
“I got an ID from our floater’s prints,” he said. “Good news—he’s got a state rap sheet. His name’s Juan Miguel Espendoza, sixteen years old, and he’s a U.S. citizen. His sheet gives an address in East L.A.”
Diego smiled. “You look surprised,” he said to Finn. “You were expecting him to be Mexican?”
“What’s on his sheet?” said Mona.
“Always the lawyer, little sister,” said Diego. “Auto theft and possession of controlled substances, same instance, busted by LAPD last June. He pleaded guilty, but he was fifteen at the time, so it was a juvenile case and he didn’t do any time.”
“Nothing since?” she said.
“Nope. But he’s a gangbanger. Or was.”
“How do you know?” she said.
“The rap sheet.”
“Juvenile offenses. I’m surprised it wasn’t sealed. Doesn’t make him a gangbanger.”
“Ever the optimist. People don’t change, Mona,” said Diego.
“Sure they do,” said Finn.
Now it was Diego’s turn to look surprised. “Agent Finn, has my sister turned you into a bleeding-heart liberal?”
“Diego, you’re a moron,” said Mona. She glanced at her watch.
Diego grinned. Then he lowered his voice and said to Finn, “We ought to go see the Irishman, see if he can give us anything on Perez.”
Finn nodded. The Irishman was an informant who ran a bar in San Pedro called Bonito’s. “Sure,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”
Diego nodded.
The door to the conference room opened and Glenn’s secretary beckoned them in.
“Ready?” said Mona.
* * *
A rectangular wood-veneer table stood in the center of the meeting room. There was a microphone plugged into a recording device on it, three empty chairs down one long side, the chair at the head occupied by DMO Glenn—meticulously dressed, as usual. Two men unknown to Finn were sitting on the other long side. The blinds were down on both windows and the overhead fluorescent lights were on. The room was airless and too warm.
The two men, whom Finn assumed were the IA agents, wore white shirts and ties, their jackets hanging on the backs of their chairs. Both men were sweating. One was tall and thin and carried his weapon in a shoulder holster. The other was heavy, had a shaved head and no neck, and wore his gun on his belt, cowboy-style.
Finn assumed they were the ones who’d closed the windows and turned off the air-conditioning. He turned it back on at the thermostat by the door, then sat down in the center chair, Mona to his right and Diego to his left.
The heavy IA man frowned, got up
, and turned the air-conditioning back off.
DMO Glenn made the introductions. No one shook hands. Glenn seemed to Finn by far the most anxious person in the room.
“You guys like to sweat, huh,” said Finn, taking off his jacket. He knew that overheating a room was an interrogation technique designed to make the subject uncomfortable.
The one with the shoulder holster—the taller, thinner one whom Glenn had introduced as Agent Ruiz—tilted his head at Mona and said, “You brought your wife with you?”
“I’m here as Agent Finn’s counsel,” said Mona.
“And as Agent Jimenez’s sister, right?” said Ruiz, smiling in a way that Finn didn’t like.
“It’s a family affair,” said the thick-necked one, Agent Petchenko, who’d turned the air-conditioning back off.
“Why’d you bring a lawyer, Finn? This isn’t an interrogation,” said Ruiz, his voice fake friendly.
Mona leaned forward and spoke into the microphone.
“For the record, my name is Ximena Finn of Holguin Associates, and I am present as counsel to Nicholas Peter Finn, marine interdiction agent with the Custom and Border Protection’s Office of Air and Marine, Long Beach Station. Agent Finn is here of his own volition, as is his patrol partner, Diego Jimenez, who was present at the time of the incident. Today’s date is Thursday, October twenty-second. The time is nine fifteen A.M. Also present are the OAM’s director of Marine Operations, Scott Glenn, and Agents Anton Ruiz and Andrew Petchenko, from the Office of Internal Affairs in Washington, D.C., both in their shirtsleeves,” she said.
“Just seems mighty cozy to me, everyone being related,” said Petchenko, glaring at Mona. He had a deep, sodden, drinker’s voice, and delivered his consonants lazily.
“I think we should get started,” said Mona.
Ruiz looked from Mona to Finn. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you joined the CBP,” he said.
Finn was about to speak when Mona butted in.
“That question is irrelevant to the purpose of today’s hearing. Agent Finn is here to talk about the events that led to the death of Rafael Aparición Perez on the eighth of October. He will talk about that and only that. Let me repeat that this is an impartial hearing and not an interrogation. Agent Finn is not under arrest, has not been charged with any crime, and has not been read his Miranda rights. Agent Finn is here to help establish the truth of what happened during events that led to the death of Rafael Aparición Perez. Ask any more irrelevant questions, Agent Ruiz, and I will counsel my client to cease cooperating immediately on the grounds that you are prejudicing this hearing.”